Speakers

Luis Cuende

CEO, Aragon One

Luis is the CEO of Aragon One, one of the teams working on the Aragon project. Luis has been into crypto since 2011, and loves how decentralized organizations can solve the world’s worst problems. Luis has been awarded as the best underage European programmer in 2011, is a Forbes 30 Under 30, a MIT TR35 and was an Advisor to the VP of the European Commission. He cofounded the blockchain startup Stampery. Prior to founding startups, he created the world's first Linux distribution with facelogin.

Griff Green

Co-founder, Giveth & Aragon DAC

Community manager for TheDAO, led the cleanup effort for TheDAO Hack from every angle, co-founder of the White Hat Group and Giveth and leading the creation of the Aragon DAC, as well as advising DAppNode, 0KIMS (iden3), ETHSignals, Open Source Blockchain Explorers NOW! and many other groups within the Ethereum Community.

Jutta Steiner

Co-Founder and CEO, Parity Technologies

Dr Jutta Steiner is the co-founder and CEO of Parity Technologies, a blockchain technology company best known for Parity Ethereum, the most advanced Ethereum client. Previously, Jutta served as Chief of Security for the Ethereum Foundation and pioneered blockchain use in supply chains as Project Provenance co-founder.

Trent-McConaghy

Co-founder, BigchainDB

Trent McConaghy did AI research for two decades, including machine creativity and AI to help drive Moore's Law, via two startups (both acquired) and a PhD. Now he focuses on AI * blockchain, via Ocean to democratize AI data, and BigchainDB decentralized database. His hobbies include Token Engineering and advising governments on AI * blockchain

Santiago Siri

Founder, Democracy Earth Foundation

Founder of Democracy Earth Foundation, a Y Combinator backed non-profit building incorruptible digital governance technology; and the Partido de la Red (Peers Party), the first digital political party that ran for elections with candidates committed to people's will online. Partner of Bitex.la, a leading bitcoin exchange in Latin America. Published 'Hacktivismo' in 2015 with Random House. Member of the World Economic Forum since 2012. Awarded by MIT Technology Review and Singularity University. Co-founded Argentine Game Developers Association in 2002.

Joe Urgo

Co-Founder, District0x

Joe is a co-founder of district0x, a network of decentralized marketplaces and CEO at Sourcerers, a consultancy firm supporting leading Ethereum-based projects. Joe previously spent three years as an Operations Manager at Coinbase. Prior to Coinbase, he was a derivatives trader for Three Arrows Capital, an international hedge fund based in Singapore. Joe serves as an advisor at Status, Keep, SpankChain, Bloom, Witnet, Abacus, Access Network, LiquidX, Fabric Ventures, Republic, and Common Interest.

Lane Rettig

Independent Core Developer, Ewasm

Lane Rettig is an independent Ethereum core developer and a member of the Ewasm team, where he is helping build the execution engine for Ethereum 2.0 (the Shasper roadmap). He is also the founder of Crypto NYC, a Manhattan-based, blockchain-focused community and coworking space dedicated to making Web3 technology accessible to all humans.

Mario Laul

Researcher, Placeholder Ventures

Mario Laul works as a researcher for Placeholder, a New York venture capital firm investing in decentralized information networks, and for Beyond the Technological Revolution, a four-year research project led by Carlota Perez exploring the relationship between technology, finance, and public policy. Each fall, he teaches an introductory course on the sociology of culture at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn, and is looking to combine the study of technology governance with a sociologically informed perspective on emerging forms of decentralized economic and social coordination.

Martin Köppelmann

CEO and Co-founder, Gnosis

Martin Köppelmann has been an entrepreneur in the blockchain space for more than 5 years. He is the CEO and co-founder of Gnosis, the decentralized Gnosis prediction market - one of the first decentralized application that went live on Ethereum in 2015 in an early verison.

Raine Revere

Co-founder, Maiden

Raine Revere is an engineer and educator in the Ethereum community who has spoken at blockchain events around the world. Raine is the Lead Architect of ShapeShift Prism and is the co-founder of Maiden, a company that delivers socially-aware blockchain education, cultural & leadership development, and diversity-powered blockchain consulting. As a therapist, teacher, and cryptocurrency engineer, Raine has the unique capacity to engage deeply with both the technical and social aspects of technology.

Aron Fischer

Governance Researcher, Colony

Aron Fischer received his PhD in mathematics from the City University of New York in 2015. He is working in the research arm of Colony: a platform for open organizations which seeks to enable new forms of decentralised organizations. The work involves a careful balancing of what is desirable in terms of governance and what is possible given the technical limitations of the Ethereum blockchain.

María Gómez

Ecosystem Development, Aragon One

María Gómez is a former corporate lawyer. She worked several years in the M&A and corporate finance practice. Currently she works on ecosystem development for Aragon.one, one of the teams working for the Aragon project.

Evan Van Ness

Founder & Editor, Week in Ethereum News

Evan Van Ness is the founder and editor of WeekInEthereum.com and a member of ConsenSys. As a Texan, decentralization is in his blood.

Jordi Baylina

Tech Lead, Iden3

Jordi is one of the strongest Solidity developers in the world and a high impact contributor in the Ethereum community. He is a co-founder of the White Hat Group, which played a major role in rescuing funds from TheDAO and Parity Multisig Hacks, author of the MiniMe token contract, the elliptic curves Solidity library as well as numerous other established contracts in the Ethereum space. Well respected auditor, most notably leading teams to audit the MakerDAO Stable Coin system and Aragon project. Founder of the donation platform Giveth, DAppNode and Iden3.

Will Warren

Co-founder and CEO, 0x

Will Warren is Co-founder and CEO at 0x which is developing public infrastructure for peer-to-peer exchange on the Ethereum blockchain. After receiving a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from UC San Diego, Will worked as a graduate research assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory conducting applied physics research. Will spent two years in UC San Diego's Structural Engineering doctoral program before dropping out to pursue an interest in Ethereum full time.

Jouni Helminen

Head of Design, Aragon One

Jouni has been designing for web and mobile for over 16 years in Finland, London and Asia. In addition to consulting in tech and finance, he has lately focused on open source - Ubuntu, redesign of Riot.im and of course Aragon. With Aragon his focus is designing the platform from human centred point of view - easy to use and accessible for anyone. Jouni is also working on Lorikeet - a design system for the decentralised web, used by Aragon and other leading Dapp projects.

Kenny Rowe

Vice President, RChain Cooperative

Kenny is an entrepreneur who brings a focus on governance, community building and collaboration to projects across the blockchain industry. Currently, he serves as Vice President of RChain Cooperative. Formerly he worked as head of operations at MakerDAO as well as a senior consultant at CoinFund. Kenny founded the Seattle Ethereum Meetup group and previously spent eight years working in e-commerce for Newell Brands in various management roles.

Laura Kalbag

Author, Accessibility for Everyone

Laura Kalbag is a designer from the UK, and author of Accessibility For Everyone from A Book Apart. She’s co-founder of Ind.ie, a tiny two-person not-for-profit working for social justice in the digital networked age. At Ind.ie, Laura works on Better Blocker, a privacy tool that protects you from being tracked on the Web, and on initiatives to create a federated personal web where everyone owns and controls their own piece of the internet.

Meltem Demirors

Chief Strategy Officer, CoinShares

Meltem Demirors is Chief Strategy Officer of CoinShares, the leading digital asset manager, and a cryptocurrency investor, advisor, and advocate, with a unique blend of experience in both legacy & blockchain-based finance and cryptocurrencies. On the legacy finance front, Ms. Demirors worked with some of the largest companies in the world, mainly on financial risk management and capital efficiency. On the blockchain-based finance side, she has had an intense focus on portfolio management and network development. She invests in cryptocurrency and blockchain focused companies and projects via her invest firm, Shiny Pony Ventures and lectures at the MIT Media Lab and Oxford.

Yalda Mousavinia

Co-founder, Space Cooperative

Yalda Mousavinia is a co-founder of Space Cooperative, a worker-owned aerospace cooperative, which is the original organization spearheading the establishment of Space Decentral, a DAO for creating a global space agency. She and other members of the Space Decentral community were awarded an Aragon Nest grant to develop a Planning Suite for DAOs and she is the lead product manager and UX designer. Prior to Space Cooperative, Yalda designed solutions for Oracle's Enterprise Resource Planning cloud software suite. Her career as a product manager and designer for software companies spans over 10 years.

Yondon Fu

Software Engineer & Researcher, Livepeer

Yondon Fu is a software engineer and researcher at Livepeer which is developing public decentralized video streaming infrastructure that helps developers scale video enabled applications. Previously, he worked on decentralized funding mechanisms for sustainable open source software as a part of his senior undergraduate thesis.

Alison Berreman

Assistant Editor, ETHNews

Alison Berreman is the assistant editor at ETHNews. She has a background in social work, and a master’s in rhetoric and composition studies from the University of Wyoming.

Christoph Jentzsch

Co-founder & CEO, Slock.it

Christoph’s background is in theoretical physics, where he developed optimized software solutions for high performance computing on specialized hardware. Christoph has been part of the Ethereum project since 2014 as Lead Tester, securing and shaping the core protocol while working on the backend of the C++ client. End of 2015 he co-founded Slock.it, working on the decentralized sharing economy through the connection of Blockchain and IoT as well as TheDAO.

Jacob Arluck

Researcher, Tezos

Jacob works on governance research for Tezos. He is most interested in improving blockchain governance to facilitate coordination and acquire the scalability necessary for widespread adoption.

Samer Hassan is an activist and researcher, Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (Harvard University) and Associate Professor at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). Focused on decentralized collaboration, he was awarded with a 1.5M€ ERC grant, the largest individual research grant in the EU, to build blockchain-based, democratic and economically sustainable organizations for the collaborative economy (the 'P2P Models' project)

Stefano Bernardi

Director, Aragon Association

Stefano has been interested in the crypto and decentralized organizations space since 2011. He is also a co-founder and venture partner at Semantic Ventures, an early stage European venture fund focusing on decentralized computing.In his spare time, he writes Token Economy, a leading crypto newsletter and organizes Unplug.vc retreats, bringing people to the mountains where he lives with his wife and two children.

Taylor Monahan

Founder & CEO, MyCrypto

Taylor Monahan is the founder & CEO of MyCrypto, an open-source, non-custodial wallet solution. Previously she founded MyEtherWallet. She is dedicated to making the blockchain safer and easier to access for everyone.

Jorge Izquierdo

CTO, Aragon One

Jorge is a co-founder of the Aragon Project and currently is the CTO of Aragon One, mostly focused on technology research. Before Aragon, Jorge was a mobile app developer and a tinkerer with any interesting tech he would learn of.

Adam Stallard

Co-founder, BrightID

Adam Stallard created BrightID to bring the benefits of being verified as a unique person to everyone. Thanks to support from Giveth and Aragon, he was able to leave his job of eight years as a distributed systems programmer working on the largest land real-estate marketplace to focus on BrightID full-time. Adam is at home on Seattle's east side and easily found in the BrightID telegram group.

Adán Sánchez de Pedro Crespo

Tech Lead, Witnet

Tech Lead at @Witnet_io, CTO at @StamperyCo, founder of @LoquiIM, lecturer, cypherpunk, skeptic and pragmatist.

Bingen Eguzkitza

Solidity developer, Aragon One

Open source software and hardware lover, long time Linux user, with a background in Mathematics and Philosophy, abducted now by blockchain trying to find certainty and the opportunity we missed for decentralization with the old internet of open protocols.

Eduardo Antuña Diez

Co-founder & Project Lead, DAppNode

Eduardo is an Ethereum DevOps and Solidity developer with an established history in software engineering during the last ten years. He has been involved with various projects including Swarm City, Giveth and audits for MakerDAO Stable Coin system. Currently his focus on the development of DAppNode: The goal of which is to achieve “real decentralization” by creating a layer of personally owned hardware infrastructure that’s easy to set up and maintain, as well as providing secure access to the decentralized web.

Jeff Emmett

Researcher, Giveth & Aragon DAC

Jeff is a researcher of cryptoeconomic primitives, such as Token Curated Registries and Bonding Curves. Working with Giveth and the Aragon DAC teams, he is helping to rethink the structure of charity in a decentralized world, and to forward the practice of Token Engineering for robust blockchain ecosystems. Jeff graduated from the University of Waterloo in Electrical Engineering, and is the author of the post 'Rewriting the Story of Human Collaboration'.

Jenna Zenk

CTO, Melonport

Jenna is a software engineer with a background in financial markets and experience in asset management. She graduated from ESCP Europe in Paris, with a Master in Management and Financial Engineering. Prior to joining Melonport, she worked in the hedge fund industry, both in Paris and New York. Her early involvement in the Ethereum ecosystem and passion for decentralization and crypto-economics got her into programming. With both financial and technical knowledge, Jenna is devoted to build Melon as the new standard in asset management.

Jeremy Macaluso

Software Engineer, Aragon DAC

Jeremy is a software engineer who has been working for the Aragon DAC. He has focused on using Smart Organizations as personal accounts, and interacting with outside applications using Smart Organizations.

John Light

Community, Aragon One

John Light works on the Community team at Aragon One, a company that is building tools for the governance of organizations and open source projects. He is also a co-founder of Bitseed, author of Bitcoin: Be Your Own Bank, free software advocate and contributor, and advisor to cryptocurrency startups and investors. John has helped organize many crypto-community events including EIP0 Summit in 2018, the Decentralized Web Summit in 2018 and 2016, and Blockstack Summit NYC in 2015. He also hosted the P2P Connects Us podcast, founded the Buttonwood SF cryptocurrency trading meetup in San Francisco, and is an avid reader and writer on the topics of peer-to-peer technology, philosophy, and culture.

Moises is an associate director and associate fellow at the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), a think tank based in Washington D.C. Moises provides analysis and research on a range of public policy issues in Latin America, including on humanitarian aid response, governance and transparency, blockchain technology and innovation for social impact, and U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America, with particular emphasis on Venezuela, his native country.

Olivier Sarrouy

Co-founder & Dev lead, PandoNetwork

Olivier has a Master degree in Computer Sciences from Centrale/Supélec. After graduatıng he worked on various open source projects before begınnıng a Ph.D ın philosophy. In 2015, he defended hıs Ph.D thesis in Communication Sciences on web-based decentralized organizations. He then worked as a Professor at University of Rennes 2 for three years discussing the economical, sociological and philosophical implications of distributed organizations and blockchain technologies. He has now resigned from academıa to work full time on the blockchain projects he leads.

Sebastian Bolaños

Web3 developer, Althea

Sebastian Bolaños is a web3 developer, organizer of Ethereum meetups, deployer of Aragon DAOs, and builder of Aragon dapps at Althea.org.

Thibauld Favre

CEO & co-founder, Fairmint

Thibauld is the CEO of Fairmint and author of the Continuous Organization whitepaper, an idea he started exploring after deep diving into TCRs, bonding curves and combining it through his entrepreneurial experience. Prior to Fairmint, Thibauld co-initiated LaPrimaire.org, a non-profit initiative aimed at transparently & democratically crowdsourcing the best candidates for the past french 2017 presidential election which gathered 150.000 citizens. Previously, Thibauld co-founded and led Allmyapps, the 1st App Store for PC, which he sold in 2014. Thibauld holds a masters degree in Computer Science and and a masters degree in Corporate Finance.

Brett Sun

Lead developer, Aragon One

A full-stack developer who loves to get his hands dirty, Brett spends his time and energy ensuring Aragon becomes not just a dream in our minds, but an impactful reality we can all play a part in.

Monica Zeng

HR, Aragon One

Monica is the founder of human.sh, a people management and coaching agency focused on crypto that works with top projects like Aragon, and Zeppelin. She’s a dropout and she has worked and lived in Barcelona and Silicon Valley prior to moving to the Crypto Valley in Zug, Switzerland. Her background is a mix of international expansion marketing, startup management, and strategy, and when not working she enjoys painting, techno and reading about human psychology.

Preston Van Loon

Co-founder, Prysmatic Labs

Preston is a co-founder at Prysmatic Labs, an independent team of blockchain engineers building the next iteration of Ethereum. He works with Ethereum researchers and open source developers to build a bleeding edge Ethereum 2.0 client supporting Sharding and Proof-of-Stake protocols.

Mathew Cormier

Project Lead, Espresso

Mathew is a software engineer from Quebec City, Canada. He is currently project lead at Espresso and a regular contributor on many open source projects. Before joining the Aragon Nest umbrella in August 2018, Mathew has worked for almost a decade on the development of workflow management systems.

Beltran Berrocal

Co-founder, Decentralized Design Lab + UX @ ENS

Beltran is a 360º designer, developer, educator, entrepreneur. He's the author of the Web3 Design Principles and proponent of the Web3 Design System, a series of guidelines and a library of components that implement the best UX practices for the space. He's also the UX designer at the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) and collaborated to solve part of the downfall of the DAO writing a deterministic parser for the Ethereum Blockchain. In previous lives Beltran co-founded and produced interactive products and an Art Foundation that exhibits 'Art for Hackers'

Rouven Heck

Co-Founder, uPort at ConsenSys

Rouven Heck is Co-Founder for the Digital Identity Platform (uPort) at ConsenSys and founding member of the Decentralized Identity Foundation. Rouven has a computer science background and over 15 years experience in banking IT, having worked for Deutsche Bank in various IT project, architecture and strategy roles in Germany, Hong Kong and New York before joining ConsenSys early 2016.

Medha Kothari

Co-Founder and Executive Director, she256

Medha Kothari is a Co-Founder and Executive Director of she256, a non profit which aims to increase diversity and break down barriers of entry in the blockchain space. She believes in exposure, education, and equitable opportunities. Medha is a developer by trade, and uses those skills to lead the consulting arm of Blockchain @ Berkeley, where she manages a team of developers and business consultants to build out full-stack blockchain solutions for large enterprise clients.

Luke Duncan

Researcher, Aragon One

Luke Duncan is a researcher working on the Aragon Project at A1. His primary focus is on governance processes and mechanisms which serve to align the interests of participants in blockchain-native organizations. He is also a passionate advocate for open source software sustainability and has recently proposed an alternative to traditional copyleft and permissive style licenses.

Jordan Muir

Founder, Frame

Jordan is the creator of Frame, an OS-level Ethereum interface working to make Ethereum approachable and accessible. As an NYC-based engineer and designer, he’s driven by projects that contribute to the acceleration of human innovation and believes open decentralized networks are an important step. He’s excited to be working on Frame alongside Aragon as part of the Nest program.

Todor Kolev

Founder, Comrade Cooperative

Technologist and entrepreneur with over two decades of experience as software engineer and architect, currently applying AI and blockchain technologies in disruptive business models. Besides technology, in the last 10 years, Todor is dedicated to building human-centric companies around democratic values. He is the founder and Chairman of the Comrade Cooperative, a member-owned organization of software developers and innovation builders, that is based on transparency, technocracy, and self-governance.

Daniel Shavit

Research lead, Pando

Daniel is the research lead at Pando and DAOIncubator with a focus on decentralized governance and crypto-economics. Political Tech after payments and digital advisory for Paypal, Mastercard, Unicredit, Banca D’Italia.

Executive Director, Ethereum Foundation

Aya originally became fascinated in the blockchain space for its potential to impact financial inclusion in emerging markets. In early 2013, she joined Kraken as Managing Director and has since been educating the public, VCs, and regulators on cryptocurrencies and blockchain innovation globally. Her passion for blockchain and creating lasting sustainable social impact in developing countries led her to join the Ethereum Foundation as Executive Director. There she supports the core development and research efforts of the Ethereum protocol, and helps to bolster the decentralized community engagement through grants, education, and events to expand the Ethereum ecosystem.

John Collins

Founder, First State Fintech Lab

John is a founding Partner at FS Vector, a Washington DC-based advisory firm which provides a broad range of solutions for financial services, fintech and cyrptocurrency firms. FS Vector assists clients with government/regulatory strategy and with the implementation of compliance programs and regtech tools.

Ryan Zurrer

Board Member, Web3 Foundation

Ryan has been an active investor and entrepreneur in crypto since 2012, backing both start-ups and token-enabled networks. Prior to building out Polychain’s investment portfolio, he was an early investor in a number of projects in the Ethereum ecosystem, ran a bitcoin mining operation throughout 2013, and built a bitcoin-remittance firm in South America. Ryan’s contributions to Cryptoeconomics include the concept of Keepers, a new cryptoeconomic model for carbon credits, the SportsDAO and he launched a Cryptoeconomics lab at his alma mater the Richard Ivey School of Business in Canada.

Constance Choi

Co-Founder & Director, COALA Foundation

Constance is a Co-Founder and Director of COALA Foundation, a global multi-disciplinary and collaborative research and development initiative for blockchain technologies. Constance is also an Associate Researcher at the CERSA/CNRS/Université Paris II and advises startups and institutions at the critical intersection of governance and techno-legal frameworks for blockchain technologies. Constance also co-founded the Kraken Exchange, where she served as General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer until 2014. Constance is a member of the California State Bar, holds a J.D. from UC Berkeley School of Law, and undergraduate degrees from Brown University and University of Cambridge.

Speaker applications are now closed

Thanks to everyone who applied to speak at AraCon 2019. The agenda has been finalised and we won't be adding any more speakers. If you're interested in speaking at future Aragon events, please keep an eye on the post-conference announcements.